The plight of the soutie is real and in his latest video The Kiffness (Dave Scott) has shone a bright light on it using broken Afrikaans lyrics. There’s a hell of a lot going on in ‘Pragtig Meisie’ so try and keep up here.
At its core, this track is about an English man professing his love for an Afrikaans girl. The Kiffness’ complete lack of vocab and syntax is hysterical – you may not agree but coming from someone who’s tried to make sense of Hunter Kennedy’s lyrics using a woordebook, I relate hard.
“I wrote this song in 2011 – I was single, and I was sitting by myself and thinking what my future wife would be like,” Scott explains when questioned about the origin of his simple love song. “Fast forward a few years, and the song became like a self fulfilling prophecy because I actually ended up meeting an Afrikaans girl and I sang the song at our wedding. It got such a good response from the wedding guests that it made me think I should maybe put some more effort into the song’s production – so that’s what I did!”
This is the first offering from Scott that really taps into his cleverly-constructed online persona, fusing tonge-in-cheek lyrics with an equally as cheeky music video. Now the plan for said video started out simply enough but Scott’s improvisational skills were tested when the husband of the “pragtig meisie” threw a major spanner in the works.
“The original idea was to get an iconic Afrikaans female singer’s face and stick it on a doll and cruise around Langebaan shooting ridiculous scenes. We were aware that using a sex doll as a prop could be perceived as quite risqué but we did our best to avoid unnecessary sexual connotations i.e. make it as PG as possible,” declares Scott.
“We thought we should better get a hold of the singer and make sure she’s cool with us releasing the video with her face on it… but a few hours later got a message from her husband saying that we definitely don’t have their permission so we had to come up with a Plan B,” Scott shrugs and I’m going with Karlien Van Jaarsveld here.
But it was director Nic Smal (Derick Watts & The Sunday Blues) who came up with the idea of superimposing Steve Hofmeyr’s face onto the sex doll and in all honesty, who needed the original meisie anyway?
“We didn’t ask Steve’s permission, because he’s Steve Hofmeyr,” Scott smiles. “I don’t think Steve realises that he was our Plan B to start with, but hey, we’ll just let Steve believe that we all owe our success to him.”
The video takes the piss out of all acoustic guitar-wielding Afrikaans singer songwriters too. There’s a particularly telling scene where Scott passionately strums a chord while kicking up some plaas dust, something I’ve seen done in more than a few videos on KykNet (and MK – #RIP) over the years.
Lets not kid ourselves, someone out there has langarmed to this song, and if you were drunk enough, you would to. Watch the video below.
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